2022 has been a year of working with less for me. The first calendar year since my graduation with a Bachelor's of Arts in History and Art History, my time has been dedicated fully to histories outside prescribed academic bounds. The malaise of inaccessibility to my beloved archives and libraries for one full year, and sitting on a mountain of writing, research, and games literacy, compelled me in late May and early June to put considered effort into critical consumption of interactive media.

For years I had wanted to create something with my adoration for kusoge, to espouse the forgotten production history of alleged spyware, create something of a memoir for how over a decade of my life was spent, put into words the ineffability of why immersive art cannot be immersive, impart hazy childhood memories of my first engagement with high art games, speak to queer reclamation of digital ghost towns, praise the creativity of independent development in the early 2010s, weep for the loss of Earth, denounce the horrors of eroguro and Japanese military fetishisation, comment on the shameless thievery of early games histories, lambaste games which ooze dopamine undeservedly, correct popular misconceptions of how things came to be, wax poetic about what big data has afforded us, demonstrate the anguish of unknowable truths, speak truthfully of the sacrosanct, share the increasingly erased, and argue for the importance of subtraction.

I have longed to manifest this creativity into a concrete something. The ideas were there, an unhewn slab of stone, monolithic and imposing.

It would be naive to argue whether or not a desire to be among the critical minds of Backloggd, and games writing more broadly, operated as a key driving force for me in this pursuit. Certainly it spurred me on, and the site's presence as a concentrated tour-de-force of outsider New Games Journalism made it a perfect fit. Putting myself out there with a contextualised discussion of Ape Escape and the critical regionalism of games and their hardware, and thereafter seeing that warmly welcomed and appreciated convinced me those ideas, bottled up for so long, were worthy of being poured from my cruet into a communal chalice.

To do away with poetics for a moment, it felt good. I had shared these thoughts in tight-knit friend groups, but of course my friends would say my arguments are sound, they're my friends. The same happened during my undergrad. My proofreading comrades certainly would not say to my face my argument is poor. Seeing my professors' eyes light up at a proposal meant so much more. Their pleas that I submit my work for publication left me dazed in delight. Their imploring that I go into grad school made me well up. The same has happened here. It is one thing to be told by those close to you that you have done well. It is another entirely for a stranger, with nothing to lose, nothing to gain, to tell you the same.

In the wake of Ape Escape, I began a multi-pronged approach to my writing. Part of me wanted to do those dormant thoughts justice. Part of me wanted to pursue analysis of obscura, lest it be forgotten as so much queer history has and had been during my undergrad.

In text I found refuge. I've not visited with my therapist for nearly a year as the static haze of a post-COVID-19 world left me in a limbo supported by Zoloft. Games, perhaps, could operate as a means to self-understanding and self-love. The act of writing was as much for the other as it was for me. It was self-validation.

In community I have felt a resurgence of drive. I remain warmed by those few laudatory comments when I posted the Ape Escape review in the Backloggd Discord. The humbled horror of Yultimona's list composed of their favourite reviews of mine. The touching consideration afforded me by Erato, Cone, Beach, Vee, Luna, and others when I bared my soul for Wrath of the Lich King. The explosion of acclaim for my tackling of Morimiya and 177. The acceptance given me that I have never felt I deserved. Even my silly game club idea has seen success thus far, despite numerous #DetchibeFlops.

It has been a short seven months since Ape Escape. A blip of time. Nonetheless, it has been a wonder to be present for it.

Thank you. Truly.

As the year draws to a final close, I have been similarly tickled by The Farnese Hercules.

"Io intendo scultura, quella che si fa per forza di levare."
[I mean sculpture, that which one does by means of removal.]

The history of humanity is a history of sculpture. Portable figures whittled from ivory, stone, and wood have been our companions longer than animals and fire. So too have we created art through the application of materials in painting, but this is a literal imprint on nature. The subtractive force of sculpture demonstrates the imposition of human force and desire into matter, rather than onto it. If painting is an additive construction, sculpture is a deliberate violence enacted onto an object. Clay wrenched from the soil, bone torn from the dead, wax stolen from the biosphere, marble hacked, wood uprooted, bronze turned molten. The material itself is acquired through action, and it is manipulated in the selfsame manner, obliterating it into unrecognisability from its unmolested state.

The likes of Michelangelo considered sculpture to be an act of freeing art from within an object. Surrounding material was superfluous, detracting from a physical realisation of universal forms. The Farnese Hercules applies that subtractive notion to the puzzle genre, inverting the logical tropes of nonograms in favour of an alogical approach.

The necessary solid nature of sculptable material makes a full understanding of three-dimensional realisation oblique from the outset. Gazing upon a block of matter might impart the idea that a figure can be crafted through reduction, but it is a continuous process of re-evaluation of the medium physically and conceptually. The Farnese Hercules takes this into consideration by limiting the player's gaze into the material to three blocks or until their view is interrupted by already hewn material. From the outset it appears as if it adheres to the logic of nonograms in requiring the player to deduce where blocks are to be excised, but in due time the player realises they can go after only sure-fire tracts of squares, and that this is the intended mode of play. That errors are labelled as faults instead of mistakes underscores this idea. Player errors are not a flawed application of logic, but the fault of the player on the whole. Their fault is proceeding without ensuring they are completely correct, in clicking too quickly or inaccurately. There is no moment of "how should I have known that," only "that was my fault."

Subtraction is not present only in the sculptural approach, however. Richard Sherriff has reduced the totality of the experience to bare elements. The Extended ASCII rendering suggests we need not extensive graphical prowess to impart the sensation of sculpture and art. The Farnese Hercules does not even need to exist as a contemporary creation; it would not be out of place as a ZZT-adjacent piece of software in the early 90s. Further still, works are quickly made of non-contiguous squares, showing depth through omission of blocks. With the Nefertiti Bust we realise the particulars of realisation are irrelevant, we need only grasp the essence of the work itself. Less truly becomes more, to the extent where so much is taken away without the end product being any worse for that subtraction. Jacob Epstein's Pieta is so bare in its presentation, yet it is undeniably honest to the original.

2022 has been a year of working with less for me. I have come to appreciate those most minimal of approaches.

Less is more.

2023 promises to be resplendent with possibility and potential. It is my goal to free the sculpture within its infinity.